“Now its amazing what doesn’t exist in the real world.

For ex: In the real world ,

there aren’t any things nor are there any events, that doesn’t mean to say real
world is a perfectly featureless blank. It means that it is a marvelous system of
wiggles in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would
project images on a ……or pick out a particular group of stars and sky and call
them constellations as if they were separate group of stars and the minds eye ..
they are not out there as constellations ready group in the sky…so in the same
way the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing
more than an idea. It is not that real difference and meditation is the way in
which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe. And
what that requires is that we shut up. That is to say that we become interiorly
silent and cease from the interminable chatter inside us. Because you see, most of
us think compulsively all the time that is to say..we talk to ourselves. I remember
when I was a boy, there was a saying – “Talking to yourself is the first sign of
madness”. Now obviously, If I talk all the time, I don’t listen to what others have
to say. And so in exactly the same way, If I think all the time, i.e to say if I talk to
myself all the time, I don’t have anything to think about except thoughts. And
therefore , I am living entirely in the world of symbols and I am never in
relationship with reality. Alright, now that’s the first basic reason for meditation,
but there is another sense and this is going to be a little bit more difficult to
understand. Why we could say that - Meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t
have a purpose, in this respect its like almost all other things we do except
perhaps making music and dancing. Because, when we make music, we don’t do
it in order to reach a certain point such as the end of a composition. If that was
the purpose of music – to get to the end of the piece, then obviously the fastest
players would be the best. And so likewise, when we are dancing we are not
aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as we would be if we would be
taking a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point. When we play
music, the playing itself is the point. Exactly the same thing true in meditation.

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the
immediate moment. Therefore, if you meditate for an ulterior motive i.e to say to
improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life, then
you got your eye on the future and you are not meditating. Because the future is
a concept. It doesn’t exist. As the proverb says, “Tomorrow never comes”. There
is no such thing as tomorrow, there never will be because time is always now.
That is one of the things that we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and
stop thinking, we find that there is only the present and only an eternal now. So,
it funny then, isn’t it that one meditates for no reason at all. Except we could say
for the enjoyment of it, and here I would interpose the essential principle that
Meditation is supposed to be fun. It’s not something you do as a grim duty.
Trouble with religion is we know it , that it is so mixed up with grim duties. We do
it because it is good for you. It is a kind of self punishment. While meditation
when correctly done has nothing to do with all that. It’s a kind of digging the
present. It’s a kind of grroving with the eternal now. And brings us into a state of
peace where we can understand that the point of life, the place where it is at, is
simply here and now.

The Easiest way to get into a meditative state is to begin by listening. If you
simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going
around you, just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were
listening to music. Don’t try to identify the sounds you are hearing. Don’t put
names on them, simply allow them to play with your eardrums. And let them go.
Let your ears hear whatever they want to hear . Don’t judge the sounds. There
are no proper or improper sounds. As it is a matter is somebody coughs, sneezes
or drops something…its all just sounds. And if I am talking to you right now and
you are doing this I want you to listen to my voice just as it were a noise. Don’t try
to make any sense of what I am saying because your brain will take care of that
automatically. You don’t have to try to understand everything. Just listen to the
sound. As you pursue that experiment you will very naturally find that you cant
help naming sounds, identifying sounds..that you will go on thinking and talking to
yourself in your mind automatically. But its important that you don’t try to
repress those thoughts by forcing them out of your mind, because that will
precisely have the same effect as you are trying to smooth rough water with a flat
iron. You are just going to disturb it all the more. What you do is this..
As you hear sounds coming up in your head (thoughts) you simply listen to them
as a part of the general noise going on just as you would be listening to the sound
of my voice , cars going by ..or to the birds chattering out of the window. So look
at your own thoughts as just noises and soon you will find that the so called
outside world and the so called inside world, come together…they are a
happening. Your thoughts are a happening just like the things happening outside
and everything is happening..all you are doing is just watching it.

Now in this process another thing is happening and that is very important and
that is breathing. And as you start meditation you allow your breadth to run..just
as it wills…don’t do any breathing exercise . Just watch your breadth breathe as it
wants to breathes. And notice the curious thing about this. You say in the
ordinary way ..I breathe..because you feel that breathing is something that you
are doing voluntarily just in the same way as if you might be walking or
talking..but you will also notice that when you are not thinking about
breathing…your breathing just goes on the same way. So the curious thing about
breath is that it can be looked as both voluntary and involuntary action. You can
feel on the one hand that you are doing it and on the other hand it is happening
to you. And that is why breathing is most important part of meditation because it
is going to show you as you become aware of your breadth that the hard and fast
division that we make between what we do on one hand and what happens to us
on the other is arbitrary. So that as you watch your breathing you will become
aware that both the voluntary and the involuntary effects of your experience are
all one happening. Now that me at first seem a little but scary . You may think,
am I just a puppet of a happening or a passive witness of something beyond my
control.. or on the other hand I am really doing everything that is going along.
What if I were I should be God ! That would be very embarrassing because I would
be incharge of everything that would be terribly responsible position. The truth
of the matter is as you see it is that both things are true. You can see it that
everything is happening to you and on the other hand you are doing everything.
For example: Its your eyes that are turning the sun into light . It’s the nerve ends
in your skin that are turning the elevtric vibration in air into heat and
temperature. Its your eardrums that are turning the vibrations in the air into
sounds and in that way you are creating the world, but when we are not talking
about it, when we are not philosophizing about it, then there is just happening
…and we wont give it a name.